


Patrick Stump's Strip Joint, or The One Where They're All Strippers

by sunsetmog



Category: Fall Out Boy, Panic At The Disco
Genre: Gen, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-14
Updated: 2009-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-31 01:39:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsetmog/pseuds/sunsetmog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where they're all (pretty terrible) strippers, Patrick owns the strip joint, and his therapist has suggested he take up a hobby.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patrick Stump's Strip Joint, or The One Where They're All Strippers

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://sunsetmog-fics.livejournal.com/37992.html) in February 2009.
> 
> Thanks to kraken_wakes and raye6 for super-speedy betas. Any remaining errors are my own, however. The word file for this fic was called 'bandom the bloody (awful strippers)', the blame for which can be laid at Spike-from-Buffy's door. Any complaints about the title should be directed towards kraken_wakes, who proved herself to be useless in a titling crisis.

The running order is: Ryan, Brendon, Jon, Spencer. 

Ryan is a really goddamn awful stripper. He's a pretty terrible lap dancer, too, but he's really fucking disastrous at stripping. Patrick puts him on first because at least the spectacle of Ryan on stage is over and done with early in the evening and Patrick doesn't have to hide out back for more than the first couple of numbers. Ryan is supposedly pretty musical, all things considered - Pete's told him that Ryan plays the guitar - but he seems to have the rhythm and the dance moves of an ostrich when he's on stage. He's all angles and straight lines and elbows and Patrick winces every time Ryan bends over the back of the chair and shakes his ass at the audience.

Patrick's pretty damn gay but he's fairly sure if he was sitting by the stage and Ryan wiggled his bony ass in Patrick's face then he'd be inclined to go back to women. 

Ryan also refuses to listen to anything Pete tells him in dance rehearsals. Ryan is what Pete terms "interpretive" and what Patrick privately terms "a pain in the fricking _ass_." Ryan has recently started to employ various scarves and paisley prints in his stripping routine, which is both an eyesore and stupidly annoying as it takes him a good half a song to untie the scarves from around his wrists. 

(One benefit of Ryan's extended stage-time is that it has doubled the amount of time Patrick can spend his office. This is a good thing as Patrick's therapist had recently suggested that Patrick take up a hobby, something he can do with his hands, and as a result Patrick's desk drawers are full of half-finished knitted scarves (Patrick can do one stitch, badly, and he tends to both lose and gain stitches without knowing why), a piece of decoupage that secretly gives him The Fear and a collection of hand made birthday cards he refuses to send. Patrick always, always keeps his desk drawers locked.) 

Patrick has tried to point out to both Pete and Ryan that the businessmen in the club are here because they want to see men take their clothes off, and not because they want to watch a post-modern expressionist dance about the fall of society as we know it, but Ryan is petulant and Pete never listens to anything Patrick says, so Patrick just retires to his office and thinks about crochet.

Ryan, Patrick thinks as he starts to crochet another square for his woolen blanket, is the worst stripper in the history of bad strippers, and Patrick can remember back to the time three years ago when everyone had gotten food poisoning and he'd ended up on stage pulling his t-shirt off to the pounding beat of Tom Jones on the sound system. That's a memory he'd quite like to wipe, and he's pretty sure the men in the audience that night felt exactly the time. Patrick just didn't have the body—or the confidence—for stripping. Ryan, however, is _worse_. Ryan takes bad stripping and makes it an idealistic _art form_. 

Patrick keeps saying that he would let Ryan go if it wasn't for the fact that people weren't exactly lining up around the block to get a job in Patrick's strip joint. Secretly though, it's because Pete's sworn that he'll quit too if Patrick fires Ryan, and even if Pete is one of the most annoying human beings Patrick's come across, even Patrick can't deny that he's got a flair for choreographing the stripping routines. 

Once Ryan's finished with his expressionist monologue about the future of humanity, it's Brendon's turn to take to the stage. 

Brendon isn't exactly _bad_ at stripping, so to speak. He's got the rhythm - unlike Ryan - but he just won't shut up. Patrick always knows when it's safe to come out from where he's been hiding in his office, because he can hear Brendon's whoops through the wall. Brendon uses the whole stage and he's energetic and enthusiastic and more than one patron of Patrick's strip joint has accidentally been hit in the face by one of Brendon's hastily discarded pieces of clothing. Brendon goes through more costumes than the rest of them put together; partly because he's got the lowest attention span of anyone Patrick's ever met aside from Pete, but mostly because he loses bits of them each night - a sock here, a pair of satin hot pants there. It adds up. Brendon might not be the worst stripper Patrick's ever met ( _Ryan_ , Patrick thinks, savagely, and drops another stitch) but he's the most expensive to run. 

He's also the clumsiest. He's always tripping over his chair on stage or falling over his shoelaces or dropping the drinks if he's hostessing. He's enthusiastic though, unlike _some_ people Patrick could mention (he thinks _Spencer_ and spills glue on his decoupage) and he's quite good at getting the clients through the curtains and into the back room for a private dance.

Admittedly, Patrick thinks, most of that is because Brendon is a bit like a dog with a bone. He talks too much and doesn't give anyone a moment to get a word in edgeways ("you wanna go to the back room? I could dance for you, you know, if you'd like, I mean actually dance and not like, fuck or something, like, actually lapdance. I'm a pretty awesome dancer, you totally should pick me, I've got _moves_ and everything, like, really. You want a dance? Huh? A dance? A drink? I could get you a drink-") and Patrick has watched more than one dazed and confused businessman follow Brendon through the curtain without really knowing what was going on. 

Most of them came out still looking dazed and confused, but Patrick was twenty five dollars better off so he figured he was doing okay. 

Patrick sometimes jokes about firing Brendon because he's costing Patrick so much in costumes, but it's never going to happen, not really. Patrick likes Brendon, likes his off-stage politeness and his secret, slavish devotion to Spencer. He's always nice, too, even if he's worked until close two weeks in a row. Apart from the extra running costs involved with Brendon, Patrick thinks that he's secretly worth every cent. 

The crowd always cheer loudly when he finishes his routines, and they keep cheering when Jon comes out on stage, although that's possibly out of sheer relief. 

Sometimes Patrick thinks that he likes Jon more than he likes Brendon, but that's only because Jon doesn't break so many things as Brendon does, or run around him like a hyperactive kid on speed. Brendon messes with Patrick's stitch count. 

Jon has the potential to be a better stripper than Brendon, but Patrick's pretty sure that Jon's been stoned every single time he's ever been on stage, so he hasn't yet exceeded expectation. 

Anyway, most of the customers look so dazed by the end of Brendon's routine the least Patrick can do is give them someone laidback to follow. 

Jon is potentially the most relaxed guy Patrick has ever come across. He's certainly the most laidback stripper Patrick's ever employed, and he's been in the business far longer than he wants to think about. In dog years, Patrick thinks, surely he's about ready to retire. In real years, though, Patrick just thinks he's old before his time. He's taken up scrapbooking. 

Jon spends most of his time offstage hanging out in the lighting box with Joe. Patrick's known Joe since he was in high school, and he's always on time with his lighting cues, so Patrick thinks he can hardly complain that he spends the rest of the time hotboxing the lighting rig with Jon and whoever else they can drag inside. Patrick likes to tell Joe that he's going to get Patrick shut down, but sometimes Patrick secretly thinks that would be for the best, and hopes that there's an undercover cop about to bust them for being in possession of a shitload of weed. He dreams of a job in telemarketing, perhaps, or maybe an office. He's making origami cranes and hanging them from the inside of his closet. 

Joe's a cool guy though, and he always shares his stash and brings Patrick pizza, so Patrick's kind of glad he's got him on his team. 

Anyway, the fact that Jon is usually stoned on stage just seems to add to his mystique. Although, even the regulars still tend to verge towards being overwhelmed when they realize they're watching a bearded man take his clothes off to a soundtrack that's comprised almost entirely of Jack Johnson. 

Jon doesn't have a routine, so to speak. Sometimes he just sits on the floor and undoes his shoelaces until the end of the first chorus. After the last time, Patrick had insisted that he switch to something which might not double-knot. He'd slipped Jon an extra hundred dollars to switch to Velcro. 

The customers tend to just stare open-mouthed at the stage for the whole duration of Jon's routine. Sometimes, Jon carries on long after his song has finished, so Mikey's left filling the gap with whatever mp3 he's got on hand. He's been known just to plug his iPod into the sound system. A stoned bearded man hopping across the stage while trying to get out of a pair of jeans can only truly be bettered by a soundtrack of Mikey's friend Frank's band Leathermouth. 

That particular experience had led to Patrick taking up cross-stitch. He picked up a few sets from the craft section in Target and he's currently halfway through a particularly ugly Winnie the Pooh scene. He thinks very dark thoughts about Eeyore. 

After Jon has stumbled off, it's Spencer's turn on stage. 

Spencer is Patrick's least favorite, but mainly because Patrick _knows_ Spencer has a nice smile. He knows because he's always accidentally walking into the dressing room to find Brendon doing an impromptu rendition of M.C. Hammer's _Can't Touch This_ (complete with full dance routine) and Spencer's _smiling_. Brendon has the world's biggest crush on Spencer, and Patrick is pretty sure that Spencer's nursing an equally stupid crush on Brendon, too. 

Patrick's pretty sure that the whole world knows Brendon has the hots for Spencer; Brendon's crush is so obvious it can probably be seen from space. It's kind of sweet, actually, the way he's always bringing Spencer gifts, and making sure he has a cold can of coke or a beer ready for when Spencer comes off stage. 

Spencer genuinely gets on with Brendon, and he definitely likes Ryan because the two of them grew up together and turned up here together and auditioned together, and Spencer spends a couple of nights a week hotboxing the lighting rig with Joe and Jon, although he's professional enough that he only ever does it after his routine. Anyway, he likes all those people and he even likes Patrick, and the reason Patrick knows is because Spencer _smiles_ at all these people. He smiles and laughs and tells jokes and beams. 

And then he goes on stage and switches on his bitch-face and turns the crowd to stone. Patrick's been trying to get Pete to have a word with Spencer about it, but it's never done any good, not really. 

Patrick's worst nightmare had come true one evening when Spencer was on stage, hanging off the pole and looking like he was so bored he might just fall asleep on stage, when the businessmen at one of the tables down in front had started making fun of Spencer's headband, promising to rip it off him the next time he passed by. 

Patrick sometimes has nightmares that are entirely the shape and shade of Spencer's headband, but still. Spencer had carried on with his routine, thrusting up and down the pole in a pair of green satin boy shorts, waving a paisley scarf of Ryan's around his head, all at the same time as glaring at the businessmen and telling them, "I'd like to see you guys _try_."

Patrick had taken up embroidery after that. 

He's got plans. He's going to hand stitch initials onto handkerchiefs, and hem them in different colored cotton. He's going to lock them in the cupboard and never let anyone see them. 

Sometimes Patrick thinks that he should just sell up and move on; he could be a clerk in a bookstore or maybe a data-analyst or a postman. His therapist says that these all sound like very good ideas, but Patrick's kind of used to the strip-joint, now. He's not sure what he'd do without Pete tumbling into his office twenty-seven times a day, bringing him coffees and pastries and packets of dried banana chips and begging Patrick to let him have the key to Patrick's secret hobby drawers. 

Patrick's taken to wearing the key around his neck on a string, but Pete just waggles his eyebrows and says Patrick's playing hard to get. One day, Pete tells him, Patrick's going to beg Pete to come upstairs so he can show him his etchings. 

Patrick sighs. Pete's probably right. Until then, though, Patrick's taking up stenciling.


End file.
